Tomorrow has been set by anti-migration groups as the “deadline” for all foreign nationals unlawfully in the country to depart. There is a dreadful repetitiveness about this. Xenophobia may not be a universal sentiment, but it is sufficiently widespread to occupy a strategic position in South Africa’s politics, and to animate large numbers of its people.
The presence of migrants has long been source of discontent, and a vent for society’s vengeful impulses.
The plan for tomorrow’s action is for demonstrations across the country: possibly something approaching a national shutdown. The organisers, the March and March movement, have pledged that everything will proceed peacefully and lawfully, but fears abound that it could take an ugly turn and lead to rioting along the lines of what took place in July 2021. These have hardly been allayed by the Zulu ethno-nationalist feeling that has attended the recent demonstrations, as well as the MK Party’s endorsement of the shutdown.
In anticipation, the government has committed R600 million in security preparations. There has also been plenty of tough talking on the matter. When President Ramaphosa addressed the country earlier this month, he pledged to “act against forces who are exploiting the concerns of our people about illegal immigration to further their own political, personal or criminal agendas.”
On the record of the South African state, this will not inspire confidence. Migration control is only one of a litany of its failings. Bold words are seldom matched by convincing action. Only the state is entitled to enforce migration control – or to perform any number of other functions – but it has shown itself indifferently able to do so.
Even more aggressive words have been deployed to challenge the narrative behind the campaign. Much has been said and written about the positive contributions that migrants make, about the imperatives of acknowledging our common humanity and of respecting the rule of law. “There is no space,” the President declared, “for xenophobia, racism, sexism, Afrophobia or any other forms of intolerance in South Africa.”
Kind of moralism
This is the kind of moralism that pervades much of the public discussion of the matter. It’s the appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s a sentiment voiced well beyond the government, if anything more stridently, in the media, civil society, religious institutions and academia. “No one is illegal”, the assertion goes. “This is not who we are”. Or as a new civic initiation has it, Siyafana Sonke: “We are all the same.”
This is debatable. Xenophobia may be the concern of the moment, but it’s hardly an isolated pathology. South Africa’s politics has always had a violent fringe to it. In 2024/25, police statistics showed 1,742 instances of public violence (“unrest” in official parlance), with xenophobia accounting for a very small proportion of these. Polling from the Social Research Foundation in 2023 found that 7% of South Africans have participated in violent protests, and as much as 30% were sympathetic towards such action.
More directly (and lethally) South Africa is also a country that has never abandoned assassination as a tool of politics. This has been described in such works as Greg Arde’s book War Party – How The ANC’s Political Killings Are Breaking South Africa and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime report: The Politics of Murder: Criminal Governance and Targeted Killings in South Africa. Comprehensive numbers are elusive (the GI-TOC put targeted assassinations in South Africa at 488 between 2000 and 2023), but to put annual death tolls in the dozens would not be unreasonable. Indeed, just over a week ago, on a single Saturday, three party representatives: a ward councillor for the ANC and two candidates, one each from the Democratic Alliance and Build One SA, were gunned down in separate instances.
Perhaps this is par for the course for a society that records close to 60 murders every day. But it might be borne in mind that this feeds on elements of the country’s political mythology, the idea that direct action, whether taking to the streets or reaching for a weapon, is a legitimate and honourable practice. Taking up arms, said trade unionist Zwelinzima Vavi, was “always an option”.
Tragic history
Nor is this merely the muscle memory of a tragic history. It is a political behaviour that resonates with large parts of the country’s elite. Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in relation to the Umkhonto we Sizwe Party and the Economic Freedom Fighters, whose vocabulary and aesthetic is saturated with militarist and confrontational imagery. It’s hardly surprising that MKP has hitched itself to the shutdown.
At its base, though, it’s also a mode of politics that finds a mainstream and (within its own distorted logic) a respectable place in South African politics. Inasmuch as the President and any number of other notables decry hostility to foreigners, there is much culpability to be shared for creating the ecosystem in which this has developed.
Drawing lines, hard and soft, between “us” and “them” has been intrinsic to South African politics for generations. If there was an opportunity to chart something new after the transition to democracy, it was an option that was not only not taken, but consciously abandoned. For the President’s party, the imperatives of racial nationalist mobilisation proved only too tempting – and could easily be fitted onto its intellectual ruminations about the “national question”. It has been interesting to hear Max du Preez recently describing the ANC’s trajectory in exactly these terms.
We’ve seen just how insidious this thinking can become. A common response to anti-migrant agitation is to ask rhetorically why white people are exempt from having to prove their right to be here. Those making this claim probably think it a fine, progressive sentiment. In reality it merely mirrors the logic beneath the marchers’ demands, that there are those who belong more than others. Indeed, there has been some sinister social-media chatter about “deadlines” for white people.
This well has watered all manner of exclusionary ideation, wittingly or otherwise. “Our people” became a standard point of reference, and probably for no one more than the President himself. Racial minorities might not be adequately “African” (a concept with no legal or constitutional meaning, but a powerful political signifier), and so of suspect loyalty. The “Indian Question” demanded resolution. Coloured people were in “oversupply” in the Western Cape. Commercial farmers were the ‘original land thieves’, and incitement against them something not to be condemned, but rather cherished as a part of the national historical tapestry.
Exclusionary nationalism
Nor is this entirely limited to government or political office-bearers, as exclusionary nationalism has its exponents among many other parts of South Africa’s elite.
“As communities and as a society, we must not be tempted to join those who want us to turn against people who were not born in South Africa and who are in our midst,” President Ramaphosa warned. That’s entirely correct. But it’s also true that fostering or tolerating hostility towards any group is not easily contained.
Hatred and stigmatisation are inherently given to jumping borders. We might want to keep this in mind as tomorrow dawns.
[Image: engin akyurt on Unsplash]
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